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trainsinanime · 4 years

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Red Web Mystery Reviews

Red Web is a podcast by Rooster Teeth featuring two guys from that whole Achievement Hunter thing that I can never tell apart (but you don’t need to know anything about this) about unsolved mysteries that often but not always have something to do with the internet. Let’s review the episodes out so far, because… well, no reason, honestly, I just wanted to.

Lake City Quiet Pills

Based on their information presented here, this whole thing and their explanation for it seem plausible enough. You have to assume that this group of apparently assassins is kind of bad at operational security, but there’s actually a lot of cases where big criminals got exposed because they used the same URL or E-mail address or similar.

Satoshi Nakamoto

I already knew about this beforehand, and I would say they did a good job explaining it. Personally, I think they should have gone into a bit more of how much a shit-show the whole Newsweek Dorian Nakamoto thing was; in short, there was no reason to believe this person had anything to do with Bitcoin, he didn’t even speak good english (which is probably what caused some of the misunderstandings), and it was both a huge embarrassment for Newsweek (at least I hope they felt embarrassed) and they needlessly hounded a completely uninvolved person for this.

But then they get into new evidence, and we see a problem that I think is a bit systematic: They don’t really go into how trustworthy the evidence is. Specifically, they say that the one person who can cast light on this might be… John McAfee. Fucking John McAfee. Seriously, that guy?

For context: John McAfee did indeed create the antivirus company that still bears his name. But he sold it in the 1990s, and thanks to money and drugs, he’s just gotten plain crazy ever since. There was the whole thing where he was implicated in a murder in Belize a couple of years ago; he kept blogging from a jail in Guatemala, later returned to the US, and keeps being part of outlandish schemes (including two presidential runs, though he failed to get the nomination for libertarian candidate both 2016 and 2020), controversies, and supposedly super-awesome tech startups that never go anywhere. It makes perfect sense that he’d claim to be involved in the creation of Bitcoin. It makes no sense whatsoever to believe him. If you’re interested and have way too much time, read what El Reg has to say about him.

Mortis

Oh god. This one makes me both want to laugh and cry. Mostly laugh, to be honest, because it is such an obvious nothing burger, but also weep for the internet that was.

The story is that they found a participant in an early internet warez network who wasn’t that great at OpSec. This is only fully revealed at the end, and they don’t even seem to have noticed that this case is clearly and completely solved.

Most of the humour for me comes from the fact that they’re rediscovering the old pre-social web, and are convinced that it’s all weird and nefarious. Why would one person register websites for their interests, and then never do anything with them? Because that’s what the internet was like back then in the late 1990s and early 2000s! Hey, look, here’s my ugly special-interest website from that era that hasn’t been updated in years and isn’t going to be updated any time soon either. That’s just what was normal back then. Same with a website for every person, or trying to do your own garage sales via your website. That was the thing to do back then. And yes, obviously it sucked and didn’t work very well.

They even realise that this is what „might“ have been going on, and theorise about this hypothetical early web. „Maybe if there was some website that linked all these together and allowed you to search“ - yeah, those existed. Digg and Technorati and Del.icio.us, remember those? All bought by Yahoo and promptly forgotten. And to be fair, they never worked as well as real social networks did.

But back then we had this glorious freedom. No sudden porn bans like here on Tumblr; no need to match any predefined template for what posts are, no user tracking by Facebook, nobody telling you that you’re tagging your posts wrong…

It’s understandable why we lost that web. Linking together is much easier if all content is owned and controlled by like four companies. It also makes it much easier to set up a new account; setting up a new website is just a lot of pain and knowledge you have to have that you don’t necessarily want to have.

But now we live in our monocultures and must live with whatever content decisions our corporate overlords make and then sell us as „community standards“, and the wild and weird web that we used to have is only a memory. And sometimes not even that; sometimes these new young kids treat it as a „weird nefarious mystery“. Actually, I just looked it up, and Alfredo and Trevor are both around 30, just a few years younger than I am. They were alive for at least the tail end if this. These guys could have known this shit!

So, yeah, the story here is not the mystery; it’s a lament for the web we lost.

D.B. Cooper

Again one I already knew, and I think they gave a good overview. Personally I’m in the camp of people who assume that he failed to make a safe landing.

Happy Valley Dream Survey

This seems vaguely interesting. One thing that kind of annoys me about this podcast is that they (well mostly Alfredo) generally assume that everything strange is necessarily nefarious, without any evidence. The whole thing here leads nowhere, after all.

Lead Masks Case

Again, I’m not sure how much weight to put on the other evidence they listed, especially that whole supposed UFO sighting. Yes, that one woman may have been very respected in her community and/or had a high social status, whatever that means. But the thing is that rich people who are super-involved in their church community or whatever can still (through no fault of their own) be unreliable witnesses and invent things that weren’t there, or not the way they were described.

Cicada 3301 (parts 1 and 2)

Personally I find this one less interesting because it’s not a mystery, it’s a riddle, and that’s way less fun. Much of the circumstances are weird enough, I guess.

What confuses me the most about this is how it’s supposed to be a recruitment tool, but it doesn’t seem to be very good at that. A lot of the steps don’t really seem to be that difficult and require just some fairly standard hacker skills. This is similar to the Satashi Nakamoto case, where one hint was „knows C++ programming“. Lots of people know that, and it’s something you can totally teach yourself. And if the people who were recruited through this were really supposed to program software, well… why did no part of this test whether they could do so? That’s a whole different skill. My conclusion is that this Cicada group is either a long con or a group that is nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is.

One thing to note here: They just casually assume that the FBI and NSA and so on are monitoring the whole internet, in real time, all the time. Which is true, we know that thanks to Edward Snowden. Isn’t that much more nefarious than any of the other mysteries here put together? How did we get to a place where Americans both think „this is the country that has all the freedom“ and „if you say or search for the wrong things you’ll get put on a government watchlist that’s just normal“ at the same time? Pervasive monitoring of a population is pretty much the exact opposite of freedom, but apparently we all in the western world just take it in stride anyway. That’s nothing to do with this podcast, though.

Conclusion

Generally okay podcast. The hosts are good storytellers, even if the stories are sometimes a bit shaky. It is at least at no point overly gross or insultingly stupid (unlike the official Rooster Teeth Podcast, which is both). So I think I can recommend it if you need something, anything to fill the quiet, and you’re already out of episodes of Black Box Down.

#red web #rooster teeth

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theteablogger · 6 years

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Bullshit

Two things:

First of all, I’ve heard through the grapevine that Andy is sharing screenshots that allegedly prove that mine are fake. For what it’s worth, I have never in my life faked a screenshot of anything, let alone a screenshot of one of Andy’s posts. The most editing that I’ve done to them is to crop out extraneous material that might identify the person who sent them to me, to join screenshots together when it takes more than one to capture an entire post, to censor other people’s names and pictures or Andy’s own contact info, and occasionally to highlight something. That’s it.

Second, I’ve recently received screenshots of a Facebook post that shows what Andy is telling his friends about what’s recently happened in LA, and how Andy awareness bloggers and tf-talk are entirely to blame for it. I’m going to share it here and respond point-by-point. I realize that Andy is talking about more people than just me, but a) there are very few of us (outside tf-talk) posting about him now, and b) I can only speak for myself anyway. This is going to be long. Sorry.

(If you’d like a quick preview of Andy’s post, he’s been saying almost exactly the same things since at least 2012, so here you go.)

One major problem with this is that the “30 second cocktail party bio” is often all that people get. His former host was very clear that he hadn’t told her about leading two cults, sexually abusing people, mentally and emotionally abusing and manipulating people, and more. What little he did tell her, he blamed entirely on mental illness and made it sound like a lot of stupid internet drama.

When he refers to “listing [his] birth name and literally every screen name [he’s] had or people have suspected was [him] since 1995,” that’s obviously about me. The reason that list is featured so prominently on my blog is that Andy has used so many aliases and screen names over the years that reading about his past can be very confusing for people. Many times, even recently, I’ve seen others express surprise that Thanfiction and Victoria Bitter (for example) are the same person, although they were familiar with most of the trouble that he’d caused under both of those names. I would never, ever mention Andy’s birth name if not for the fact that his earliest known online manipulation and lies were under that name.

Now, here’s the really big issue, for me: I have never said that Andy is a sociopathic narcissist abuser. I have never tried to label him with any specific diagnosis or even a DSM category.

Once in 2014 (before I even had a blog) I submitted a post to 1-purp0se that included something about emotional vs. cognitive empathy, positing that Andy had the latter, but not the former. I’ve regretted that part of the post ever since because I am not a mental health professional and that was only my opinion. In the years since then, I have made sure that I could substantiate everything with screenshots and I have not made anything approaching a diagnostic claim.

I have always been very clear that I have never met or personally interacted with Andy. It’s there for all to see in my FAQ. Also, I have never, ever so much as implied that Andy has abused me in any way. Anyone who thinks that I have either has not actually read my blog, or has a serious reading comprehension problem. I have never even suggested that X was anything like Andy, and have only shared those stories on my blog in hopes of being helpful to other survivors. I am disgusted by the implication that everything that I post is merely a projection of my own experiences of abuse...and at the same time, darkly amused that this is the best Andy can do to refute anything that I’ve said about him.

I have never rejected, harassed, or attacked anyone who’s contacted me about Andy. I have been attacked and harassed by people attempting to defend Andy, and I had a bit of a meltdown in 2015 when I was attempting to defend one of Andy’s friends in tf-talk.

When Andy posts social justice things, he does so in a way that shows that he has little more than a surface-level understanding of the issues, and that he’s more concerned with appearing to espouse a currently popular cause than with actually supporting it. For example, while “raising awareness” about Ferguson, he repeatedly made analogies equating black people with dogs and wild animals. He told people affected by the late-2014 wave of fake suicides in SPN fandom how they were “allowed” to feel and respond. In 2016 he made a number of posts that included misleading and false election statistics, and was very dismissive of people’s concerns about a Trump presidency. That’s the tip of the iceberg, and all that was just on Tumblr. Andy whitesplains and mansplains all the damned time.

There’s “making new friends”, and then there’s forcibly inserting yourself into a pre-existing social circle, acting like you know them all extremely well, and putting intense pressure on them to introduce you to other friends of theirs who are either connected to or actually part of the cast of the webseries on which you are currently fixated. The latter is what he did in LA, according to people who were actually there and were involved.

When Andy says good things about his friends, or other people, they are often backhanded compliments (e.g., his incredibly condescending liveblog of a friend’s SPN fic) or blatant negging (such as making extremely hurtful and gross comments about a woman’s body and following them up with over-the-top assurances that he thinks she’s beautiful). Does he do this every time he makes a positive comment about someone? I have no idea. But it happens often enough to be cause for concern.

"If people say I don’t hurt them, it’s proof that they’re brainwashed or afraid of me, etc. If friends stand up for me, that’s proof that I have created a cultish, us-against-them mentality.”

That first sentence is part of what set off my 2015 meltdown, so I’m not even touching it. I have never said anything even close to that. I have often talked about the fact that Andy has led two actual cults, and that he fosters “us-vs-them” thinking in his friends because he did and he does. Many, many former friends of Andy’s have spoken about the us-vs-them thing, and it’s evident in many of his posts over the years.

I have never said that Andy needs to tell everyone that he is “a sociopath who was intending to inflict pain.” What makes his “apology” posts fauxpologies is that he continually finds reasons to excuse or minimize acts of abuse he has committed, to explain things away as “misunderstandings”, and to deflect blame in a variety of ways. He also tends to make significant omissions and to bend the truth as far as he can unless/until he’s called out on it.

“We know the secret.” This is hilarious because that’s exactly what Andy used to tell the Bagenders and the DAYDians: “[XYZ everyday occurrence] seems insignificant to everyone else, but because we know the secret, we understand that it’s a message from Kali and Raz,” or what have you. I think there have been a handful of times that I’ve said that something Andy’s done would have sounded innocuous coming from anyone else, but takes on more sinister overtones when his history is taken into account. These things generally have to do with specific lies Andy has told, or with specific, documented ways that he has manipulated people in the past.

This is very misleading. No one has moved the goalposts; there never were any goalposts in the first place. Nobody said, “Andy, if you do these specific things, then we’ll believe that you’ve changed and we’ll never talk about you again.” I have said, and have seen other say, that maybe if he did this or that thing it might indicate that he was serious about changing, or that something that he was doing at the time was a reason to hope that he was honestly trying to change. I and many others have also said numerous times that part of the process of moving on for Andy would have to be leaving fandom for good. Andy is the one who decided that putting on a show of leaving fandom (but still sharing fanart and trying to get other fans’ and creators’ attention via mentions and fannish tweets) was the one and only thing he needed to do in order to convince everyone that he’s a different person.

And this next bit is the real crux of the issue: even if he really had “ticked all [the] boxes” on an imaginary list of criteria that Turimel, or tf-talk, or the Andy awareness blogs, or whoever had given him...it wouldn’t matter because he is still engaging in many problematic and abusive behaviors. He is “actively, presently committing abuse”, and I believe that he is still dangerous. I refer you again to Molly’s post about his recent stay with her. On the other hand, I have never made any claim that he is abusing Meg or the cats, or about “dozens of other current victims”. (Past victims that we don’t know about? Sure. Although I’m not very fond of the word “victim”.)

I won’t claim that I stand behind everything that’s said on tf-talk, or every post that every other blogger has made. But by all means, try to claim that there’s bias and twisting in my timeline, when it’s full of substantiating evidence in Andy’s own words and in the words of people who have been hurt by him.

I’m not sure where he’s getting “a dozen” from. There are maybe five of us blogging about him sporadically on Tumblr now (very sporadically, in most cases), and an unknown number of anons in tf-talk and fail-fandomanon. Our blogs and tf-talk often go quiet for long periods of time, and he isn’t mentioned that frequently on FFA anymore...until something like this happens.

I love the implication that no one who’s decided to stay away from Andy based on the many warning posts about him, the contents of tf-talk, Abbey’s blog, my blog, etc. has actually read any of it. They’ve all just made blind assumptions. But Andy’s not saying anything bad about them! Oh, no, they’re still smart, reasonable, good, empathetic, woke, and the kind of people that he wants to be friends with and work with. See what I mean about saying shitty things about people and then following up with lavish praise? This is also exactly what this anon on FFA was talking about. Anyway, based on my Statcounter and the fact that Google Docs will show me how many people are currently reading the timeline whenever I open it, I’m going to say that far more than .0002% of people actually read this stuff.

And here it is: it is ALL OUR FAULT that Andy hasn’t changed, even though he’s trying so hard. Comparing himself to a snake that’s had its venom sacs (not poison, Andy) removed is very disingenuous as it implies that it is now impossible for him to do significant harm. That isn’t true of anyone, let alone someone with a 20-year history of lies, manipulation, and abuse. And he actually did “bite” someone recently--again, read Molly’s post, and realize that all happened just a few days ago.

The truth does speak for itself. Those people in LA already had serious concerns about Andy before they read about him online, but they had been cutting him a lot of slack. Molly was already aware that Andy was, for example, trying to dredge up her memories of extremely abusive past relationships in order to manipulate her. She and his friends had already realized that he was constantly lying to all of them about pretty much everything. They’d already pegged him as a performative ally. They’d noticed that he negged the hell out of trans and plus-size people, specifically playing on issues of gender/body dysmorphia, and that he was competitive and condescending toward other men. All of this was based on their own direct observations of his behavior, before they had any idea about his history. And the person who filled them in wasn’t a blogger or someone from tf-talk; it was a close friend of theirs who realized who he was and felt the need to warn them.

(Also? Even if none of the LA people would say that Andy had actually harmed them--I don’t know because I haven’t talked to them all--it is evident that he at least tried to harm them psychologically and emotionally. None of the above behaviors can be waved away as accidents, especially given that they were happening regularly and frequently.)

So what is Andy to do? Maybe stop doing the things listed above, for a start. If what his friends read online (again, after spending time with him in person for a couple weeks) really hadn’t matched what they knew of him personally, the outcome would have been very different. But they’d already been comparing notes on his shitty behavior, and when they read the links they’d been sent, everything that had been happening suddenly made sense. That’s why they kicked him out. If you’re a manipulative asshole, people may be willing to let things slide for a while--but when they find out that you’ve been doing the same shit and worse for 20 years, yes, everything might just be snatched away from you. And that’s your own fucking fault.

Here’s a further comment from Andy:

This is fucking disgusting.

Other than the occasional tf-talk anon, the only person who has regularly (as in, more than an off-hand comment) compared specific words and behaviors of Andy’s to a past abuser of their own was Delwynmarch. And that was several years ago; it’s been a long time since he posted anything at all. Del had his fair share of insightful, on-point analytical posts, too--like his breakdown of Andy’s attempt to explain away his admission of having committed rape and sexual abuse. It’s incredibly disingenuous and dismissive to suggest that the volumes of information and analysis that others have written amount to nothing more than projection, and that we’re just a bunch of poor, ignorant babies who don’t realize how misguided we are. He feels sorry for us. Give me a fucking break.

I have been open about being a survivor of abuse and having lost people in my life to cults. While that is part of what inspired me to start blogging about Andy, that doesn’t mean that it is the entire basis for all of my opinions and analysis. Andy is fond of analogies, so I’ll use one here: This is like saying that because I was once bitten by a dog, any time that I feel the need to correct my own dog’s behavior, I’m obviously just projecting my past experience onto him, so I should just back off and let him keep shitting on the rug.

Furthermore, as much as he likes to say that we don’t know him and therefore shouldn’t act like we understand him...I know Andy a hell of a lot better than he knows me. I’ve been reading others’ words about him since 2003, and I have probably millions of his own words about his life, his mental health, fandom, and a host of other topics, dating back to 1998. All he knows of me is what little he sees on this blog.

Nice try, Andy, but I neither need nor want your sympathy. Nor do I accept any measure of blame for what happened last week. You did it to yourself.

#andythanfiction #thanfiction #andrew blake #andy blake #andrewmblake #psa #abuse #leaving fandom #andy blake defense squad

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

In the calm before 2020, FiveThirtyEight is taking a look at the ideas and people who are nudging the country’s rapidly changing political conversation in one direction or the other. We’re calling these people and ideas “nudgers.” (Creative, we know.) Our second nudger? Michelle Obama.

“If you make me miss Michelle, that’s grounds for breaking up,” a young woman said into her phone Wednesday night in Brooklyn. She was crossing the street to get to the Barclays Center, where former first lady Michelle Obama was speaking. While most authors struggle to corral their mother’s friends into a bookstore, Obama is a month into a six-month-long worldwide stadium book tour. The events are political rallies masquerading as pop culture phenomena. The talk brought out vendors selling bootlegged T-shirts with her face on them and “Black Is Beautiful” pins. Women, many of them dressed to the nines, some still in workwear, streamed into the stadium.

To these attendees, Obama’s life story and public image have merited all that enthusiasm, and they aren’t alone in thinking so. Her memoir, “Becoming,” is massively successful, having already sold 3 million copies. It has also provided Obama with a vehicle for her Trump-era cause: appealing to the better angels of the Democratic base. The book itself, meanwhile, digs into her life pre-politics with surprising candor and introspection.

“When they go low, we go high,” Obama said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention during former President Barack Obama’s last year in office. It’s a speech and phrase that have been invoked many times by Democrats during the Trump presidency, sometimes to refute the premise of the quote. Earlier this year, Eric Holder, who served as her husband’s first attorney general, memorably said, “When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.” Hillary Clinton said of Republicans, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.”

Michelle Obama is not beyond a Trump dig, of course. (“Bye, Felicia” is what she says she was thinking when she was waving goodbye at the end of President Trump’s inauguration day.) But the former first lady wants things to be more civil from the Democratic side. “We call it empathy — being able to step into someone else’s shoes,” Obama told the Brooklyn crowd, urging them to keep an open mind in the current political climate.

Obama herself embodies a refutation of Trump’s America — she is one of the world’s most famous women, and she is black. She has been savvily using that to her advantage. Her talk in Brooklyn was backlit by photos of her from her time in the White House, in which she hugged children, military veterans and her husband. She spoke about her rise from the black middle class of Chicago to Princeton and Harvard. She talked about empathy and open-mindedness, but also about how “hope is not a passive word — it doesn’t just happen, you have to actively work for hope.” The Brooklyn crowd, many of whom were black women, could hardly miss Obama’s point. Especially when she added that “the people who want something else are going to the polls too.”

One can easily imagine Michelle Obama as a star surrogate for a 2020 presidential candidate (though she likely won’t be a candidate herself). The book talk, moderated by a breathless Sarah Jessica Parker, felt like a stump speech in places, as Obama emphasized her work with military families and her accomplishments in bolstering nutrition awareness in schools. She was funny in person, even while telling jokes I’d seen before in news clips, and it struck me that the tour was a canny way for Obama to continue to demonstrate her influence — and her husband’s influence — on not just the Democratic Party, but on American culture.

If the book tour is unabashedly aimed at empowering women (who are, not coincidentally, the driving force of the Democratic Party base), the book itself is a more nuanced rumination on life than you’d expect given the breathless “girl power” tone that some internet coverage of Obama adopts.

When I sat down to read “Becoming,” I, like so many, already knew the top takeaways: Obama had a miscarriage, used IVF to conceive her daughters, smoked pot in high school and said she would “never forgive” Trump for promoting the conspiracy theory that her husband was born in Kenya.

But the achievement of the first half of the book is her unerring ability to spell out the sacrifices of ego and time she made when she chose to spend her life with “a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing” hers. (In the second half of the book, Obama’s prose is almost imperceptibly smoothed out by the political realities of needing to not to spill too much tea on her White House years.) She’s an acute social observer, particularly when it comes to her husband: “In my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers. I was doubtful he’d earned the hype.” And she is honest about what marital compromise actually looks like: “Our decision to let Barack’s career proceed as it had — to give him the freedom to shape and pursue his dreams — led me to tamp down my own efforts at work.”

While the circumstances of her compromise might be extraordinary — doing it for a man who would become president — the dynamic is familiar to millions of American women. It resonates with the mommy-tracked and the deferred dreamers, the ones who enthusiastically “like” articles about how Grandma Moses didn’t become a famous artist until her late 70s.

Yet compared to the first half of her book, Obama has been curiously flattened in her public image. She remains all smiles, perfectly toned arms and confident red lipstick in our popular imagination. Not much of the frustration and disappointment she so honestly articulates in her book take center stage.

And perhaps that flattening has something to do with her devotion to her overarching political cause — because Michelle Obama, whether she likes it or not, is a figure of great political import. She knows some Americans are craving a figure of inspiration and positivity in a time of national divisiveness (the irony being that there are probably very few Republicans attending her stadium tour). For so long, Obama was, as she put it, “a missus defined by her mister.” In a Democratic Party that is looking for lodestars to guide its way, Obama’s power is both dynastic and iconoclastic — a reminder of the romanticized past administration and a politician who claims she isn’t one. She knows the potency of that paradox: People trust you more when you don’t seem thirsty for the glory.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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racingtoaredlight · 5 years

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Last week, only days after he was nominated by President Donald Trump to replace Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.) withdrew after it was discovered that he had virtually no intelligence or national security experience. Such experience is mandated by the law which created the position of Director of National Intelligence and when it was discovered Ratcliffe had embellished what little experience he had, the already tepid reception he received became downright chilly and it was clear that the Texas congressman would not be confirmed. Ratcliffe’s withdrawal led to a new question: with no pending nominee, there Office of the DNI would need an acting director. The current deputy, CIA veteran Sue Gordon, was reportedly not considered for the nomination by Trump and when it became clear that a new nominee would be needed, and that it would not be Gordon, this created an awkward situation. Seeing the writing on the wall, Sue Gordon resigned her position with an effective date of August 15. Gordon’s resignation, and her departure from the federal government, represents a drain of talent and experience which has been a hallmark of the Trump administration; it started out with the State Department under the leadership of Rex Tillerson, and this exodus spread to other cabinet level agencies such as the Agriculture Department, which is in the process of losing some of its most experienced scientists. This, along with the federal judiciary being filled with hundreds of Trump nominees in their 30s and 40s, will be among the most salient parts of Trump’s legacy.

Andrew McCabe, the former chief counterterrorism official at the FBI and one of the most important “bogeyman of the Right,” throughout the FBI’s investigation into the actions of the Trump campaign in 2016 and the early Trump administration in 2017, has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department over his termination only hours before his retirement from the bureau was due to take effect. McCabe is despised by Trump supporters because he approved the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, and he has been assailed as a leading member of the so-called “Deep State” of bureaucrats and career Washington D.C. professionals who have stood in the way of Trump’s political movement. Because he was fired before his retirement began, McCabe lost out on government retirement benefits that he would have been due, and the loss of these benefits is the basis of his lawsuit. McCabe’s lawsuit, if it is permitted to go forward, could have serious implications for the Trump administration once the suit reaches discovery. While this is by no means an existential threat to Trump or his administration, it does threaten to shine light on an area which former Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought to keep concealed.

In January 2018, Babe.net, a pop culture website and blog targeted at apparently post-feminist 18-24 year old women, published a story by writer Katie Way in which she chronicled how an anonymous twenty-something women had gone on a date with comedian Aziz Ansari which, she alleged, turned into the worst night of her life. The story, which came out just as the wave of the MeToo movement began to crest, attracted immediate attention. A few months earlier, MeToo was born out of a series of articles outing powerful men for engaging in behavior towards women which ranged from inappropriate to sexual assault. One such article was a lengthy expose of wildly popular comedian Louis C.K., who was long rumored to have used his fame to coerce women into sexually uncomfortable situations and then to force their silence. Aziz Ansari had achieved a similar level of popular acclaim both for his stand-up comedy and for his roles in Parks and Recreation, among other shows. And now it appeared that an emerging media outlet had scooped a story in which Ansari was made to appear to engage in similar behavior to Louis C.K. This story, however, came out just as the scene at Babe.net itself was becoming tumultuous. The site, itself a spinoff from another web imprint, was not profitable and was instead dependent on continued investment from venture capitalists. The office culture of Babe.net, according to several of its former staffers, was little better than the accusations levelled against Aziz Ansari in its breakout story. Babe.net continues to exist today, but it is largely a zombie form of what it was a year earlier, and most of its most significant contributors have moved on to other things.

Anyone who has lived in a city or town in a low-lying area near water, has dealt with mosquitoes. Mosquitoes have been the bane of humanity for thousands of years, but their role in spreading diseases, such as malaria, was only understood at the outset of the twentieth century. Prior to then it was thought that malaria—which literally means “bad air,”—was caused by the poor air in a particular locale; a result of the so-called “Miasma Theory,” of diseases. Taken more broadly, this is about the role of mosquitoes in shaping human history and viewing them, as small and insignificant as they seem, as apex predators. Any book which proposes that human history turned on the role of a single organism is generally suspect; it is certain to have fascinating historical turns, but, because of its singular focus, it is also certain to stretch logic and causation in the interest of making its intended point. Nonetheless, there is one jaw-dropping statistic from this which cannot be ignored: “Just twenty-two years after Columbus stepped onto Hispaniola, a census revealed that the local Taino population had dropped from between five and eight million people to just twenty-six thousand. Along with smallpox and influenza, mosquito-borne diseases led, by Winegard’s estimate, to the deaths of ninety-five million indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, from a pre-contact population of about a hundred million.”

Before the 1980s, musicians of all levels of popularity, were able to make a living off of their artistry. Whether through joining the union and performing in sanctioned-clubs, getting signed by a record company and cutting an album—or albums—in the studio, which were then pressed and pushed for radio play, and through touring, from the dawn of recorded music through the 1980s, a musician could expect to have a reasonable career. This no longer appears to the be case, as the music and recording industry has undergone a series of seismic shifts, starting first with the weakening of musician’s unions and the introduction of Compact Discs or CDs (and less expensive cassettes) in the 1980s, the development of the internet in the 1990s, and the proliferation of songs in the MP3 format in the late 1990s and 2000s. Making money as a musician now seems, other than for the top 2% of artists, a fool’s errand. There are two things interesting about this trend: first, that it has occurred in a context where the sonic quality of recorded music has decreased from what it was on vinyl albums in the 1970s, and second, that it has not deterred young men and women from becoming musicians. This is a meditation on the music industry as it was, as it became, as it is, and as it could be.

Existentialism is a dreary intellectual pursuit. If, at its core, life is devoid of meaning beyond the fact that we persist as living organisms, then the proponents of such a belief system must be dull, unimaginative individuals with whom it is painful to join in a social capacity. While not boorish, existentialists ponder subject matter which would be unwelcome at most parties. And yet most existentialists in the mid-twentieth century were not boring individuals, and instead sought out drink and drugs as a way to prevent the “hardening” of life. Drinking and partying is often seen, especially in the western mind, as a wasteful as it is pleasurable. This mindset, no doubt rooted in the Puritan and Protestant mindsets of preservation of the earthly life as a means to gain just rewards in the afterlife, finds no traction in existentialism. “Partying can involve a similar act of destroying such expectations, as well as expending time, money, food, drink and brain cells. Some might call this a waste, but what are we saving ourselves for? A good life isn’t always a long one, and a long life isn’t necessarily a happy or fulfilled one. Rather, what’s important is to embrace life passionately. Existence is a process of spending ourselves, and sometimes requires leaving our former selves behind to create ourselves anew, thrusting forward into the future, disclosing our being into new realms.” Perhaps the most profound part of that, to me, is “existence is the process of spending ourselves,” which is an acknowledgment that we all face mortality and the ability to face it is, I think, largely based on the ability to honestly say that the act of spending has been enjoyable and satisfying. If that enjoyment and satisfaction be found in a bottle, then so be it. But, and this is important, the expense of life still involves the responsibilities to participate and create; which is perhaps why Sartre cured hangovers with amphetamines. Viewed in this lens, existentialism can be seen to cut through a series of societal norms and expectations about behaviors, and that alone makes it interesting, at least in this context.

Finally, the Center for Politics Crystal Ball takes a look back on the 2016 election and asks the question queued up by the release of the Mueller Report: did Russia’s interference in the election actually affect the results? It is important to consider two things when looking at this question: first, whether the Russian interference had any effect does not take away from the profoundly negative nature of the interference; and second the Russian interference could have had a result upon the election, without actually swaying any individual races. Both of these considerations are implicit in this article by Alan Abramowitz analyzing the 2016 election.

Welcome to the weekend.

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imnoexpertblog · 6 years

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Read It, Play It, Watch It

5/25/18

IT’S FRIIIIIDAYYYYYY! The weekend is upon us! I’m so happy I get to sleep with my love the next two nights. Sleeping without him all week sucks. I might sleep more soundly when I am alone, if it was at least at night. But I sleep during the day with the light and heat and noise, AND I sleep without him, on top of all that. I shouldn’t complain, though. Third shift has brought our family a lot more money and a lot more quality time together. Working second shift was hard because I never saw my boys. I would go to work for 3:30pm, Baby would get done with first shift around 4:00pm, meaning we didn’t see each other even in passing. I wasn’t home until quarter after 11 at the earliest. Sometimes Baby would stay up until I got home to say goodnight and so I could get a kiss, but that was way too late for him to be awake with how early he needed to be up the next morning. Nugget of course is asleep WAY before that, too. So sleeping without Baby five days a week is a small sacrifice in comparison to the pros.

Anyway! Let’s get down to business! Let the entertainment blog commence.

I know for a fact of a lot of people aren’t about reading books/novels. I will keep putting them in my blog to hopefully entice you all to pick one up and read! I think it’s so relaxing and soothing. Honestly. But I’ve always been one for words, whether it was reading them or writing them myself. I’m sure you can tell. While I wait on my boss to bring me the third Last Vampire book (the series I mention in my first entertainment blog, "Entertainment-Centered" by Christopher Pike), I started reading IT by Stephen King. Yep, the clown movie is based on a book. I’ve come across a lot of younger people who didn’t know that. I need to start by saying I am reading this book after having seen both he original movie and the first part of the new remake. I didn’t watch It until I was about 20 years old, and it came out in 1990, six years before I came out (LOL). I’m a little late to the party, but hey I wasn't even alive at the time. People go nuts for the new one, though! And I think it makes sense. I really enjoy the movies. Not to mention the guy who plays the new IT, Bill Skarsgard, is actually pretty hot in real life LOL. Crazy how you can get someone who is attractive to look so creepy. Back to the book. After having Baby watch both of the movies, we started googling if there was anything about the second movie out on the internet yet. We stumbled upon reviews that compared the book to the movie and there was talk of very weird scenes in the book, such as sexual scenes and of the like. I was so confused and it honestly got me curious. I had quickly forgotten about it though until my little sister (I call her Vanny) told me she got the book as a gift. She said she would never read it so I said give it to me! When I got it from her I was like, “HOLY SHIT.” Excuse the vulgarity but that book is EFFING MASSIVE. This is easily going to be the largest book I will ever read. It doesn’t seem like I am very far into yet, but considering there are about 1,168 pages… It will take at least 300 or so to get a good dent into it. This will be a multiple-part review because of how long this thing is. Stephen King is a man of detail, hence how long a lot of his works are. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes it’s overkill. I haven’t reached any unnecessary scenes yet but I hear there are a few. I can see differences from the movies already, but I won’t go into detail so I don’t ruin anything. Reviews are more positive than not. I think it might be harder to read anything this long. It will be an accomplishment, that is for sure. Knowing the general path of the story, I wonder if I will grow impatient with the book. I’m thinking if I read about 30 pages a day before bed, I should be able to get it done in a month and a half (skipping some days here and there). That seems to be a good game plan. Lastly, I am wondering if IT will scare me as a book. No writing has ever freaked me out like a movie can. I actually have somewhat of a sleep issue (I haven’t been diagnosed with anything because I’ve never officially told medical professionals about this so I wouldn’t want to call it a “disorder” or anything) which worries me while reading or watching something scary. I will get more into that in my next blog; it’s going to be a personal one for sure.

I may have mentioned in my About Me that I am obsessed with Harry Potter. My Aunt got me my first Harry Potter books when I was pretty darn young and I had no idea what it was, but I gave it a shot and read the first couple books within weeks. Nothing compares to how I feel when I read those books, especially the way I felt when I read them for the first time. HP is one of the most positive and heartwarming memories from my childhood that has stuck with me through everything. Watching the movies was almost just as amazing because of how young I was. Seeing my favorite books come to life was like a dream come true. I grew up with it all. The first movie was out in 2001 when I was five and the last one came out in 2011 when I was 15. It was a long five years between the end of HP and the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016). I wished so badly I could relive the feelings of HP being new again, but I was very skeptical about Fantastic Beasts. There are connections between FB and HP of course, but it just wasn’t the same. I did watch it, however, and I enjoyed it. Not the same way I enjoy HP still to this day, but enough to make me curious about the second one that will be out this fall Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. There is talk about the more recent play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” to become an actual movie near 2020? I don’t know if that is legitimate or not, and I also don’t know what I think of it either. I’m honestly looking forward to the day that Harry Potter is remade altogether. I know it will be in the distant future, but I am still looking forward to the nostalgia. So. I went into all of that to adequately explain my love for Harry Potter and how excited I was to play the new Harry Potter Game app for your cell phone (Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery). Anyone who knows me know that I do not play games on my phone. Even when I was younger, all I played was Words with Friends because that was all the craze when I was in high school. I recently was into the interior design game, Design Home. That was until I got tired of running out of design money so easily. Anyway. I started playing Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery. It’s set up in chapters. Each chapter you attend lessons, complete challenges of sorts, and gain points in different categories through the decisions you make. You get to customize your avatar, which is fun, but you only get to change so much on the character. Now, I was initially very pumped about this game. Until I played a few chapters. There is a different storyline than the movies, of course, which I actually enjoy. But. All you do throughout the game is click through conversations, sometimes choosing the response, click through lessons that you sometimes run out of “energy” for (meaning you have to wait until you gain enough energy back and that could be anywhere from 4 minutes to an hour and 40 minutes). There are a few spells you get to trace on your phone screen as if you are waving a wand, but that is as involved as it gets. I am on chapter 5 of 10 and I’m already over it. I am disappointed in how simple it is to "play," because the storyline seems intricate enough and the graphics are pretty good, too. Oh well. I will probably finish the game regardless. Either way, this was a very anticlimactic situation for me.

Saving the best for last. The new season of Thirteen Reasons Why came out last week. You may know that this has been very controversial. From the start, I was BEYOND stoked for TRW to be a show. I was excited enough when I found out they wanted to turn the book into a movie. A show meant more content and a longer time watching so I was definitely cool with this. I read the book in a few hours when I was in high school. I couldn’t put it down; I thought it was amazing. It got you thinking, that’s for sure. If you’ve watched the first season, you know as much about the show as I do. If you have read the book and seen the first season, you know the show has more going on in the storyline in order to fill gaps, modernize it, and to create room for future story. I think it’s a very busy show, especially in the beginning and end of the first season (I will admit I was a little bored in the middle). Some people have watched the entire second season already, and I can see why. The first one ended with so many loose ends, really making us wonder a million things. Watching this was very interesting since I read the book and loved it so much. Picking up on the differences right away, deciding how I felt about characters, etc. It was an adventure for sure. I also realized early-on just how hard-hitting this show is. Knowing how many kids watch this show, I was just hoping it didn’t glamorize the idea of suicide. It freaked me out a little knowing my 15-year-old Vanny was watching this. Teens and pre-teens are so impressionable. The show also gets pretty graphic, which was on purpose to get their point across. I do think it’s something to be careful suggesting to others and also something to be extra careful watching if you struggle with depression or suicide. That being said, I do still think it’s really powerful. I’m currently watching the second season and I am enjoying it! This is different for me because there was no second book. I don’t know anything that happens now. But I can say I like where it’s headed so far. Have you seen the first season? Both seasons? None of it? Give it a chance if you haven’t yet!

What are your weekend plans?! I mentioned in my previous blogs that Baby and I are getting tattoos, going to a wedding, and then we will be going up to his family’s cabin. I still really really want to go to the zoo! Hopefully I get to know Nugget’s mother more pretty soon. It’s not easy, being a mother and having some woman (that is random and foreign to you) walk into your child’s life. I know my mother and stepmother have struggled in the past. I don’t blame anyone for initial resistance. I just want to make sure she (and everyone) knows how much I love Nugget and his father, and that I will never leave them. As much as I love Baby, Nugget is everyone's top priority. I have done everything I can to make sure they are living a full and happy life so far. I won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, or ever. These boys are my life now. These last nine months have been everything to me. I can’t wait to keep living my dream life with my two Prince Charmings.

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park-j1m1n-bts · 8 years

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Top 50- 11 Songs of 2016

I am a bit late doing this but it took me FOREVER to do! I originally tried to do top 20 but hated leaving so many great songs out so I decided to do top 50. Too many good songs were released in 2016 but here goes...(p.s. I am extremely bias when it comes to boy groups so apologies in advance that about 97% of this list are sung by male singers... whoops)

50. JAY PARK (feat. GRAY) - DRIVE

I swear this song is probably my go to song when driving anywhere (no pun intended!) It’s just such an easy song to listen to

49. BLOCK B - TOY

I never used to listen to block b as their previous music wasn’t really my style but omg this song is so good! and I love how chill the dance is

48. ASTRO - INNOCENT LOVE

This song for me is Astro’s best song because it just shows off their amazing voices. They are so sweet/innocent but their talents are seriously no joke. A beautiful song

47. HALO - MARIYA

Such an underrated group omg! I love how happy this song is and their stage outfits for this comeback were the cutest ever!

46. IMFACT - FEEL SO GOOD

IMFACT is another group that I don't really stan but my god this song is amazing! the beat drop is crazy and their dancing blows me away

45. INFINITE - THE EYE

This group continues to comeback with catchy songs! I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of hearing this song

44. KNK - U

It was such a shame the MV for this song didn't get release but nevertheless this song definitely deserves to be in my top 50. “ I need U!,U,U,U,U” aah I love it

43. SEVENTEEN - FAST PACE

WOW! I’m kinda speechless when it comes to my opinion on this song .... one word... sexy

42. MONSTA X - QUEEN

Monsta x my boys!! I love them so much and they never disappoint! I can’t quite believe this song is only 42 on my list :O but honestly there were sooo many good songs this year. I LOVE this song it is such a jam!!

41. SEVENTEEN - AJU NICE

Another Seventeen song? You’ll start to see a pattern soon of who my bias groups are...but anyways I love love love this song, from the lyrics to the choreography to the gorgeous outfits! Their stylist needs a pay rise I swear

40. JESSICA - FLY

As I’m sure you are figuring out, I don’t tend to stan female groups/singers so I don’t really know much about Jessica except that she is a former member of girls generation but I discovered this song on youtube one day and loved it!

39. B.A.P - SKYDIVE THIS SONG AAAH! But lets not forget the amazing Oscar winning music video omg... I have watched it too many times, I love their dark concept

38. IOI - VERY VERY VERY

IOI was probably my favourite girl group so I was so shocked to hear they had disbanded! I liked how upbeat this song was and for a non Korean speaker the chorus was fairly easy to sing to ;)

37. TOPPDOGG - RAINY DAY

STAN THESE BOYS! they are so underrated that it saddens me! I really did not expect this style of song from toppdogg but I dig it so much!

36. BTS- BOY MEETS EVIL

(Right I just would like to say first BTS are my all time fav kpop group hence my tumblr account being 99% BTS so it was extremely hard to not put EVERY song that bts released in 2016 in this list so taking that into account I think I did pretty well.) J-HOPE my god you slayed this song! It is low-key (high key!!) sexy and I love it

35. 2PM- PROMISE (I’LL BE)

DADDIES! I hate using that word but forreal it was the first word that came to mind. They are just soo mature in their vocals and the way they present themselves. You can’t not love them

34. BTS - AM I WRONG

It was a toss up between am I wrong and 21st Century Girl but I had to pick Am I Wrong because when I first listened to the album I remember how socked and I hype I was listening to this song! It is just so different to their usual songs but I love it nonetheless :D

33. BTOB - I’LL BE YOUR MAN

What a beautiful song! I love everything about it! this is probably a good time to also congratulate Peniel for being so brave and opening up about his hair loss <3 I love the part where the vocalists are all kneeling down around my two boys when they are going all in with their rap! it is so powerful.

32. LEE HI - MY LOVE

I’m quite surprised myself that I put this song in my top 50 because 1) its a female singer and 2) it is a very slow song. but anyhooo this song is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard. I cam across it watching scarlet heart ryeo: moon lovers and as soon as I heard it, I had to research it and find it because woah!!

31. MADTOWN - EMPTINESS

Again, such a beautiful song and don’t get me started on Lee Geon notes at the end... that is one stunning man trust me

30. GOT7 - BOOM X3

Now I have to admit, I’m not a huge GOT7 stan... I love a lot of their music don't get me wrong, I just don’t follow them religiously haha! but I love love this song especially the contrast between jackson’s and yugyeom’s voices. All of their voices just fit so well with each other.

29. KANTO - LONELY

I had never heard of this man before this song but forreal where has he been all my life!!? this song is such a jam, I highly recommend it!

28. MONSTA X - STUCK

I remember when I first heard this song and I fell in love straight away, so you could image my reaction when the music video was released! it was everything I wanted plus more. Well done boys !!

27. ZICO - BERMUDA TRIANGLE (FEAT. DEAN & CRUSH)

These three boys in one video is deadly!!!! I love how all three have completely different styles but when put together it’ s a masterpiece! I don’t think I will get tired of this song!

26. EXO - LUCKY ONE

When Lucky One and Monster came out, I have to admit I didn't like this song however after hearing a few more times I became OBSESSED! their live performances of it are fantastic!

25. ERIC NAM - CAN’T HELP MYSELF

This is my go to song if I need cheering up! it’s just such a happy song... I absolutely love it!

24. KRIS WU - JULY

I discovered Kpop in June 2015 and my first exo music video was call me baby therefore I wasn’t familiar with Kris but i stumbled across this song one day and from then on I have had it on repeat! its sooooo good! (his hair in the music video though is questionable hahahaha)

23. BTS - MAMA

AAAH This was so hard to choose... i love all of the solo songs obviously but personally mama smashed it out the park! the music is so groovy and the message behind the lyrics just makes it even better (p.s. proud of all my boys for composing and singing their own songs <3 )

22. MONSTA X - BLIND

Something about this song is so sensual... makes me feel some kinda way

21. B.A.P - KILLER

This song is from their recent album and even though all of the songs on their are BRILLIANT .. This song caught my attention “yeah she’s a killer... bang bang” i just love it

20. EXO - LOTTO

This song has had a lot of controversy with people saying it is too autotuned but in my opinion it is one of my fave exo songs! I still scream every time baekhyun comes out with his “lipstick, chateau” aaah

19.SHINEE - PRISM

If i had to describe SHINee to someone using a song, it would be this one. I can’t really explain it but this song is just a funky jam haha

18.EXO CBX - THE ONE

EXO SUBUNIT!!!! whooo i was sooooo excited when i heard about this unit. in my opinion i preferred this song (The One) to Hey Mama. i just love the part where they go “just you and me alOoOne” so groovy

17. BTS - LOST

SLAYYYYYYYY VOCAL UNIT! (especially my man jimin ooo i could listen to him sing all day)

16. BIG BANG - FXXT IT

Kings. Every single person i have shown this song to can’t help but jam to it! its impossible to sit still! aaaah its amazing

15. PENTAGON - YOUNG

I think this song was pre-debut I'm not sure but still you - yes you reading this now, you NEED to find this song on the internet and listen to it because damn the dance moves and the smirks and the argh just heavenly

14. SEO IN GUK - BEBE

This is a fairly new song and honestly i didn't know what to expect. I knew Seo In Guk was an actor but wow his vocals are no joke. The music video though...he is a very sexy man!

13. JAY PARK - ME LIKE YUH

I love love love this song and it is in English which is even better as i can sing along properly and not act like i know what I'm saying whereas in reality I'm actually just making noises!

12. SHINEE - TELL ME WHAT TO DO

Their voices in this are so angelic! really really talented boys. Their live performances of this song as well blew me away, the idea with the white sheets is beautiful.

11. PENTAGON - CAN YOU FEEL IT

I know i know it just missed out of my top 10 but this song without a doubt is AMAZING. And can i just say the visuals in pentagon is no joke! when i first discovered them i was like “he is my bias..... oh no him!..... wait no he is cute” i think currently i have 3 biases but it changes every week ;)

Right so that is my 50 -11

i have decided I'm going to do top 10 as a separate post! this took me FOREVER so i hope everyone enjoys .... and please check these songs out you will not regret it!!!

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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How 2 Midwestern College Kids Became Trumpworld’s Favorite DJs

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-2-midwestern-college-kids-became-trumpworlds-favorite-djs/

How 2 Midwestern College Kids Became Trumpworld’s Favorite DJs

James McElwain breezes past the line outside Joy District, a three-story nightclub in Chicago’s sceney River North neighborhood. The bouncer recognizes him, nods and points him to the VIP entrance. A black laptop bag slung over his shoulder, James cuts across the dining room to the employees-only back staircase, shakes hands with a security guard, climbs two flights of concrete stairs and emerges in the second-floor kitchen, where he’s met by a phalanx of cocktail waitresses in gold tank tops and black booty shorts. “Hi, James!” they greet him. A second security guard is elated to see him, and James wraps her in his meaty arms for a hug. He crosses the dance floor and climbs into the 4-foot-high DJ platform on the club’s western wall, ready to perform.

Sculpted, with a strong jaw and cheekbones, and standing 6-foot-2, James stands out, even among the horde of 20-something party bros who have descended on the club this Saturday night in October. And not just for the way he looks: All the while James snakes his way through the club, he talks about how Donald Trump possibly holds the secret to free, sustainable energy.

Story Continued Below

“Trump’s Uncle John was an MIT scientist, and he got access to the files the FBI got from Nikola Tesla,” James informs me.

It sounds like bullshit, but the part about FBI files is true. Immediately after Tesla’s death in 1943, the federal government seized hundreds of documents belonging to the legendary inventor. The files were subsequently reviewed by none other than John G. Trump, head of research at MIT and late uncle of the 45th president. Possibly included in those documents—in addition to designs for Tesla’s infamous intercontinental death ray—are plans for creating a sustainable, worldwide energy grid. Or so James and his fellow amateur internet sleuths believe. In his report about the files, John Trump called Tesla’s work “speculative” and unworkable.

Meanwhile, Paul, James’ identical twin, finishes parking their murdered-out Jeep Patriot down the block and joins James in the DJ booth. Together, they form the house DJ duo Milk N Cooks. Paul, the more baby-faced of the two, sits against the wall as James prepares his MacBook Pro for their set.

At 28 years old, they look like a Berlin nightclub version of the Winklevoss twins—black skinny jeans and complementary wide-collared, raw cut, crew-neck T-shirts (James’ white, Paul’s black). They have a decent fanbase, with tens of thousands of followers across their various social media accounts and millions of streams between their SoundCloud and Spotify profiles. They’ve played as far as Rome, Hong Kong and Hanoi. But they occupy an unusual, niche space in American pop culture: They’re the unofficial DJ duo of the loose-knit cohort of conspiracy-theorizing, mainstream media-hating, far-right voters who have risen to prominence in Trump’s wake.

In 2018, Milk N Cooks were the featured entertainment at A Night For Freedom, a conservative meetup organized by far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich, a friend of theirs, which drew more than 700 self-proclaimed “deplorables.” They wrote the score for Cernovich’s recent documentary,Hoaxed, about liberal bias in the news media. Their Twitter and Facebook accounts are filled with posts mocking Hillary Clinton, celebrating Trump and railing against the “deep state.” Last summer, they gleefully played a gig at Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.

On an aesthetic level, Milk N Cooks defy the image of the stereotypical flyover state Trump voter. Their mix of culture and politics is so peculiar that it seems like a marketing ploy, but they insist it’s not: In fact, they say they lost about 15 percent of their social media followers after they started publicly supporting Trump during the 2016 campaign. People have called Milk N Cooks Nazis, white supremacists, racists, fascists and members of the alt-right—all labels the duo rejects. Artists have declined to appear with them because of their politics, and their management has publicly disavowed them. But the twins continue to mouth off on politics—everything from the Democratic presidential candidates (“Joe bye bye-den!”) to Robert Mueller’s performance in Congress (“insane and sad honestly”).

As it turns out, they supported Barack Obama in 2008. And for anyone curious about how two former Obama voters flipped for Trump—a topic of interest not just to EDM fans but a whole industry of political strategists heading into the next election—it was not initially because of Trump himself. The man who turned them on to far-right conservative politics was Alex Jones, the InfoWars founder who was sued by the parents of Sandy Hook victims for alleging the 2012 elementary school gun massacre was a hoax. The McElwains’ embrace of the fringe right shows just how deeply the cynicism and anxious thinking of alternative media and conspiracy theories have infiltrated American politics.

Whatever controversy might be swirling around Milk N Cooks, no one in the crowd seems to know or care at Joy District on this October night. James starts the set and plays a string of crowd favorites—Drake, Pitbull and Blink 182, “Tipsy,” “September,” “Mr. Saxobeat”—mixed over a house beat, and the dance floor swells. There are bros in flat-brim hats, plaid button-downs and Barstool Sports hoodies, and three women draped in white “Bachelorette” sashes. There’s zero indication anyone is here to see a MAGA DJ crew.

***

The first time I met James and PaulMcElwain was nine years ago in the beer garden at KAM’s, the grimy dive bar on the University of Illinois campus in Champaign. I was a senior, limping toward graduation, and the McElwains were sophomores. I had never spoken to the brothers, but their reputations preceded them. James had bought a pair of turntables the year earlier and taught himself, and later Paul, how to DJ. The McElwains burst onto the Illinois fraternity and sorority scene; before long, everyone knew about this pair of tall, jacked identical twins taking campus nightlife by storm.

Just as instantly, people hated them. They were conspicuously happy meatheads whom women seemed to love. They had begun making a name for themselves as Milk N Cookies (they later shortened it to Milk N Cooks to fit on a promotional flyer). They were dismissed by many as a novelty act—untalented hacks trying to capitalize on the late-2000s EDM craze with their twin gimmick.

But the brothers I met back then weren’t the self-important jerks others had made them out to be. I was in the beer garden looking to bum a cigarette, and James (or was it Paul? I couldn’t tell them apart) happily obliged. They seemed like generous guys who liked to joke around. They were the last people I would have guessed would get interested in politics.

James and Paul grew up in Palatine, Illinois, an upper-middle-class suburb some 25 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, where they lived with their parents and two older sisters. To hear them tell it, theirs is a classic tale about the hope and folly of the American dream. The McElwains were “broke,” they say, until James and Paul turned 5, when their father got into real estate and cashed in on the pre-crisis housing bubble. They moved into a McMansion in a development their father built, only to have the money dry up once the recession hit, when they were 18 years old. Still, politics was never discussed in the house beyond their dad telling them, “Vote Republican, lower taxes.”

Their awakening came in college. Like so many millennial voters, the McElwains say they were enthralled by Obama’s first presidential campaign, specifically his promise to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they quickly soured on him.

“I trusted Obama and CNN so much,” James says between bites of steak at Old Grounds Social, a bar-restaurant in Chicago’s Lincoln Park area where we met in September. “And then I remember the timetable to bring the troops home kept changing—from 30 days, to 90 days to six months. And I was like, ‘Dude, what the hell is happening?’ This was the entire reason I supported the guy, and now he’s adding troops?!”

“People assume conservatives want war all the time, but that’s not the case for us. We’re noninterventionists when it comes to foreign policy,” adds Paul, who’s having wings.

It was around this time that a member of their fraternity introduced them toLoose Change, the viral YouTube documentary that posits “9/11 was an inside job” and inspired a generation of conspiracy theorists.

“That’s when we got red-pilled,” James says. He and Paul became fascinated with the film’s notorious executive producer, Alex Jones, and gradually adopted his deeply cynical worldview.

Still, they remained “focused on school, girls, fraternity life, DJing,” Paul recalls. After a 35-day jail sentence for drug possession, the McElwains dropped out of college just before their senior year and moved to Chicago to earn a living DJing full-time. Their career highlight came in 2013, when their remix of “Animals” by Martin Garrix exploded and was played live by world-renowned EDM acts Tiesto, Afrojack and Hardwell.

Neither voted in the 2012 presidential election, but their political fervor was reignited in 2016. Like many InfoWars acolytes, Milk N Cooks were skeptical of Trump when he announced his candidacy. Paul thought of him as a “Sharper Image billionaire,” chintzy and shameless. But Trump piqued their interest with his emphasis on domestic manufacturing and slashing the corporate tax rate, and eventually with his pugilistic style. “I like him because he doesn’t give a shit,” Paul says.

They cheered in their living room when Trump told Clinton she should be “ashamed” of how she had attacked her husband’s sexual assault accusers. As the election grew closer, the duo’s social feeds, once reserved for sharing songs and information about live performances, turned into a mixture of Clinton-bashing, conspiracy-peddling and pro-Trump memes.

“We didn’t know it was a risk to start talking politics,” James says. “But if we could go back, we would do it again.”

***

Politically, the only concrete policiesthe twins advocated for during the time I spent reporting on them were lower taxes and a strong domestic manufacturing sector. They identify as “libertarian independents,” butmore than anything, theirs is a politics of grievance and skepticism—against the shadowy establishment and its amorphous, nefarious agenda, and against a mainstream culture they see as stifling free expression and obfuscating the truth.

I’ve scoured hundreds of Milk N Cooks’ posts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and listened to much of their work. Their music is apolitical, except one song that samples a speech by Jordan Peterson, and that’s just a bunch of self-help babble. Online, the McElwains aren’t shy about retweeting fellow right-wing provocateurs like Cernovich, Jack Posobiec and Ali Alexander. They love to own the “libs,” often in ways that are vulgar and offensive. They clearly revel in stoking political tensions and amplifying the president’s dog whistling. In July, for example, they tweeted a poll asking, “Does ilhan Omar hate the USA”—milking a controversy over Trump’s xenophobic and racist comments about the freshman congresswoman.

Since Trump was elected, people have left negative Yelp reviews for the clubs where Milk N Cooks perform, calling the twins “racists.” In 2017, actress and singer Taryn Manning canceled an appearance with Milk N Cooks at the Summer Camp Music Festival at the urging of her publicist—Milk N Cooks believe it was because the publicist didn’t like their politics. Manning declined to comment.

Marilyn Mayo, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, has studied Milk N Cooks since their performance at A Night For Freedom; she does not consider them white supremacists or alt-right, but rather “alt-lite.” “We’ve made a distinction between the alt-right and the alt-lite,” Mayo says. “The alt-right is very specifically white supremacist. The alt-lite may share some ideas with the alt-right—they may be against immigration and anti-feminist—but they’re not white supremacist.”

Still, when it comes to such labels, “the line between the two of them is very blurry,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Center for Right Wing Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. “It’s much more of a distinction without a difference,” adds Peter Simi, sociology professor at Chapman University. “One of the goals among this fairly disparate of far-right extremism is to sow confusion. And the best way to do that is to rename yourself constantly so nobody can pin you down. You’re gaslighting people, in a way.”

James says he doesn’t buy this equivalency, and thinks it’s further proof of the media’s liberal bias: “If you are at all to the right, you’re labeled ‘far right.’ If you aren’t a liberal, you are ‘alt-right.’”

It doesn’t help the McElwains’ cause they both look extremely Aryan and rock the high-and-tight haircut co-opted by white nationalist Richard Spencer and his many alt-right minions. But Milk N Cooks deny they are white supremacists, or alt-right or even alt-lite. “There are a lot of great people who support Trump, just like there are a lot of racist, misogynist assholes,” James says. “I like the way I look. I’m not a fucking Nazi. I’m not going to disavow my haircut like Macklemore’s bitch ass.” When I asked them about misogyny—I’d come across a lewd tweet from the twins about Senator Kamala Harris’ relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown—Paul wrote in an e-mail, “Wouldn‘t it be misogynist to assume Kamala can‘t handle criticism about her political rise simply because she‘s a woman?”

Al Rothlisberger, who manages a sports bar in Chicago and met and befriended the McElwains through the hospitality industry, has left some scathing responses on their pro-Trump Facebook posts. “I love these guys, but I worry they’re part of a political wing that’s hijacked conservatism and just wants to burn the whole thing down,” Rothlisberger says. “I want a political stance a little more thought-out than, ‘Yeah, we have a fellow bro working for us in the White House.’” (“Digital schizophrenics,” the McElwains say, when I ask them about Rothlisberger’s comments—their term for people who attack them on Facebook but buddy up to them in person.)

Cernovich, who came to know Milk N Cooks in 2017, when the twins kept tweeting at him about their shared political views, says he has since warned the DJs against being so public with their political views. “There aren’t many pro-Trump cultural figures because the social cost is so high,” Cernovich says. “What creative person wants to be conservative? You’re young, you’re virile, you’re hot, you’re hip. You don’t want to preserve the status quo, you want to be creative, do new things, push boundaries.”

But the McElwains have not backed away from politics, and they maintain they’re being misunderstood.

“Even before politics, we were the bros easy to hate,” James says. “People would get pissed at us just for having a good time.”

“It shows how confidence threatens people who are insecure,” Paul adds. “They think, ‘Why isn’t this person bogged down with the issues I’m facing? Fuck them!’”

***

“There’s fluoride in the water,and it will turn you gay,” James tells me, laughing, as I go to fill a glass of water in the kitchen sink. “The water in the fridge is filtered.” It’s a reference to one of Alex Jones’ most indelible on-screen moments, when he railed about the government “putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin’ frogs gay.” James’ comment might be a joke, but in the bathroom, the deodorant is aluminum-free; the toothpaste, fluoride-free.

We’re in Paul’s new apartment on Chicago’s west side in October. Paul had moved in with a friend, marking the first time the brothers, inseparable since birth, were living apart. On the ride to his brother’s place, James was listening to the latest episode ofThe Dan Bongino Show,another podcast with a conspiracy-minded host who has benefited from the Trump presidency.

Talking with James and Paul, it’s evident they’ve spent untold hours listening to conspiracy theorists. Like their idols, the McElwains are prone to tangents, can call up obscure “facts“ off the cuff and possess a seemingly endless reserve of energy for political discussion.

“I’m not saying kids didn’t die“ at Sandy Hook, James tells me at one point. “But you can watch the three-hourWe Need to Talk About Sandy Hookdocumentary and find over 50 different anomalies that are really frickin’ odd. … And it’s like, ‘Is anyone going to explain this?’”

I recently asked James if he stands by this comment, given the trauma these conspiracies inflict on the families of Sandy Hook victims. “We understand the pain it can cause to question the circumstances around that tragedy, but we don’t think it should be wrong to question things to find answers that are not clear,” he wrote in an email. “We wish no harm on anyone ever, be it emotional or mental pain from victims of tragedy… we are simply curious people looking for truth.”

When I asked if the twins think it’s dangerous to use their platform to propagate conspiracies, James wrote: “It’s dangerous for any platform to propagate conspiracy theories. Harassment aimed at Sandy Hook families due to Alex Jones, for example, or myself being called a Nazi because an MSNBC contributor said Trump supporters are Nazis by association. These examples are on different ends of the spectrum but both show why people, even ourselves, need to be careful when declaring facts regarding a theory versus opinions on a matter.”

Going forward, Milk N Cooks hope to find ways to blend politics and music more. They’re contemplating a YouTube show in which they analyze the news of the day. At one point, James muses about working with Kanye West—“We have the musical capability, but also because we connect on the Trump thing.” (Kanye has since distanced himself from the president.)

The McElwains have no such plans to abandon their Trumpism. In fact, they see a bright future under the current administration.

James’ partner is a Mexican immigrant. (The McElwains are “pro-immigrant,“ James says. “But I also think you should have a secure process to know who‘s coming into the country.“) On March 25—the day after the Mueller report’s release—his partner gave birth to their son, Leon. She has another son, Roman, from a previous relationship. The couple plans to raise both boys as one family, with the help of Roman’s father.

“I am very excited to raise these boys, and biracial boys at that, in this America,” James wrote to me via email after the birth. “It’s odd though. I see a vibrant economy, with a president who’s protecting civil rights, protecting the country, reforming prison sentences—tons of amazing stuff. Then you have people on the far left who see the complete opposite; a crumbling economy and a nation filled with white supremacists ready to kill you at any corner. It’s sad to see there may be no harmony between people anytime soon, but it is something we gotta live with.”

#Favorite #Foreign #Politics #Trumpworld

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kingmindint · 6 years

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Interview: Halsey Minor on Transforming the Video World with VideoCoin [Part 1]

Halsey Minor is a serial entrepreneur with a resume that will make any startup nerd’s head spin.

The bulk of Halsey’s entrepreneurial experience comes from building, innovating, and investing in the then-nascent Internet world. Halsey is widely regarded as a pioneer of the Internet world, and has thrown his gauntlet into the rapidly-developing blockchain world. Halsey’s notable accomplishments, accolades, and experiences include:

Founder of CNET, one of the first media sites to publish technology and consumer electronics reviews, news, articles, podcasts, videos, and blogs in 1994. During Minor’s eight-year leadership, CNET became one of the Internet’s first profitable companies. Halsey led the site to become a NASDAQ 100 company, and it was eventually acquired by CBS Corporation for $1.8 billion in 2008.

Co-founder and early investor of Salesforce.com, investing $19.5 million in 1999. Halsey worked closely with John Dillon and Marc Benioff. Halsey was the second-largest shareholder when Salesforce.com IPO’d in 2004 with a 10% stake.

Briefly collaborated with Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon’s, as per this 1999 relic Wired article.

Halsey spun off CNETs technology to a web-publishing software company called Vignette in 1997 and acquired a 33% stake. Vignette would later become one of the most successful IPOs in the following tech boom and had a market cap of around $26 billion.

Halsey provided seed funding for the music service Rhapsody in 1998.

Halsey sold Grand Central Communications to Google in 2007.

Founded Uphold, a digital money exchange service and early Coinbase competitor in 2014.

Founded LivePlanet, an end-to-end capture, distribution, and monetization system for immersive video.

In November 2017, Halsey launched VideoCoin, a blockchain-based project aimed at building video infrastructure for the blockchain-enabled Internet.

What is VideoCoin?

VideoCoin recently closed their pre-ICO fundraising round and beat their goal of $35,000,000.

In broad strokes, VideoCoin is a distributed computing project that aims at storing, encoding, and streaming video at an affordable, efficient, and sustainable rate. VideoCoin aims to utilize unused or underutilized computers in data centers to facilitate the powering of the network.

Halsey’s project will rival cloud-based video processing providers such as Amazon Web Services and provide the same services at an estimated 60% to 80% discount, while also providing video producers the ability to build their own apps within the VideoCoin ecosystem.

Editor’s note: Getting the chance to interview Halsey Minor was awesome, and we made sure to ask a variety of questions that allowed him to shed light on different aspects of the cryptocurrency world from his unique series of high-level experiences. Questions highlighted in italics and bold were shortened to save readers from our interviewer’s (my) rambling.

This is the first part of a two-part interview and primarily focuses on Halsey Minor’s new project VideoCoin, how he applied his experiences founding CNET and co-founding Salesforce.com apply to blockchain entrepreneurship, and how Halsey sees the future development of the video industry.

The second part of the interview contains dialogue around innovation and entrepreneurship with new technologies, problems with the current banking system, regulation, the global landscape, and how the cryptocurrency industry contrasts with the Internet industry in the mid to late 90s.

Alex: Could you tell me a little bit more about VideoCoin? Why did you guys start? What’s VideoCoin seeking to solve in the next year or two?

Halsey: Let me give you the history.

I’ve done a bunch of things you’re probably familiar with and a lot of them have involved launching platforms.

When I started CNET, there was no web publishing software. I created the companies and then wanted out. I kept 35% of it. They became the leading publishing company and an 11-billion-dollar company. I left CNET to help John Dylan and then Marc [Benioff] build Salesforce. Marc came to me and I was looking at buying CRM software and saw all the problems in the industry. I ended up putting $19 1/2 million dollars and leaving to basically help build the company for the next four and a half years. A lot of these things have been sort of an outgrowth of a lot of the businesses that I’ve started, maybe even all of them have been outgrowths of specific needs that I’ve had.

Just in this industry in general, just for background, I started my first company in crypto in 2013. It’s called Uphold. It’s a CoinBase competitor. It’s a great product. One of the few companies that are connected to the US banking systems so you can connect your bank account. It’s very profitable, it’s been very successful. It’s not as big as CoinBase but I ran that for two and a half years. There was so much regulatory stuff, it just drives me crazy. I brought an investor in as a CEO.

Uphold’s home page.

I left to build a VR video company called Live Planet. We have our own camera, we have our own cloud, we have our own software. The cloud ingests this video, which is really kind of 4K video. Then it has to process it to send it to Facebook or to YouTube or to Samsung Galaxy Gear or to Oculus.

And so, a single file that’s ingested, coming from the 4K camera, spins up hundreds of processes for encoding the video. Just as a kind of data point, if we took one of our cameras in and ran it for an entire month, 24/7, that our costs, just using our Google infrastructure, would be about $30,000.

Live Planet’s home page.

So, the company is called Live Planet because the idea is to put these cameras everywhere. From zoos to theaters until you could essentially drop into any location around the world because these cameras are streaming live. In order to build the cloud, I’d hired Devadutta Ghat, who built Intel’s video streaming cloud, which they sold to Facebook. He built the software, he ran the data center and he did not go to Facebook with the acquisition. He’s one of the few people in the last 10 years who actually built a video streaming cloud. And by that, I mean encoding, which is all the processing part, the storage, and the streaming. We’re an interesting company in that we’ve got, in my case, very deep crypto experience going back to 2012 and a highly profitable business and very deep in experience in video.

[Editor’s note: this is really f*cking cool.]

I’ve been someone who’s always been fairly attuned to changes in the architecture of competing. I actually started CNET in 1993 as an internet company. We actually launched the website in April of 1995. So, it was very, very early. The architecture of the Internet as compared to AOL and all those other services, it seemed like the next logical step. When Marc came to me with Salesforce, the idea of getting rid of client-server software and building a centralized hub made a huge amount of sense in terms of cost.

What attracted you to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency?

It took me honestly a couple of years. I saw Bitcoin and other currencies as a way of forming a new kind of payment system. I have to admit, for a while, I really thought that the blockchain was really a technology looking for a solution. It took me probably about, really until 2016 or 2017 when I started to think about it as things like Ethereum started coming out. I started realizing that it’s actually an entirely new architecture for computing. In the simplest form, it just allows computing to be turned into a commodity in the same way that Uber has turned cars into commodities and Airbnb has turned homes into commodities.

It does that because it could do three things. It can prove that a computer has resources, it can prove that the computer has used resources, and then you have a ubiquitous payment system that doesn’t require money to be moved from border to border. I don’t have to pay our miners in China in yuan.

We started using these new payment systems. Two other parts that were sort of key catalysts was one, realizing that there’s 20% to 30% of servers that sit in data centers that are totally unused. They’re called zombies. If they were to mine bitcoin or some other currency, they would need to buy special cards, but all computers have a video encoder.

Every computer that’s sitting can do VideoCoin mining. So, you’ve got these huge resources that are out there. You have the ability now to compensate them across borders.

Video itself is going through a rapid transformation. It is itself at an inflection point. You’ve got the HD going to 4K going to HK and then you’ve got things like VR video, which we know very well. That’s really going from video being something you watch to life you experience.

VideoCoin home page.

All of this has led to video now being 80% of the Internet and growing at a 25% compounded annual rate. It’s really made it very difficult for large media companies to deal with the costs of this transformation of consumption going from broadcast, which is basically costless, to being forced to connect to all of these consumers directly over the Internet and pay all these fees.

The last thing I’ll just throw in is that all of these media companies who are spending all this money on video, they’re mostly paying Amazon and Google, both of whom are their direct competitors. The only business that Amazon has that makes money is AWS and that’s the business they’re playing into.

Jeff Bezos is famous for saying that other people’s margin is his opportunity. Amazon has never actually had a profitable business. Everybody has been Amazon’s opportunity. The problem now, for the first time, Amazon has something to protect. AWS is 3/4’s or 4/5ths of the valuation of Amazon. They make a ton of money and you’ve gotten media companies who have rapidly escalating costs of video because video has gone from being delivered by satellite or cable to being delivered one to one over streaming and media companies.

You were talking about video itself as an inflection point. Do you guys have any plans to go beyond just the infrastructure of creating the VideoCoin system which is already awesome and I’m sure will have a lot of far-reaching effects on the industry? Do you guys have anything planned for onboarding more people to use video and your platform?

I’ll tell you a brief story about Salesforce. Marc Benioff started Salesforce, but he moved to Hawaii and for 13 1/2 years, John Dillon ran it. I lived in San Francisco and spent a lot of time with John. Mark was going to start something called Database.com. Database.com was going to be the cloud. I said to Marc, look, I just put $19.5 million dollars in this company for you to make Salesforce the CRM company and you go and build the cloud as another company. You should take your CRM app and just generalize it and build a cloud. This is part of a larger discussion that ultimately had him coming back and becoming CEO about three years into the life of a company.

What we’ve done is we built this app that ingests large amounts of video and is capable of taking that video and transforming the format to everything from Youtube360, Facebook360 to Oculus Rift, for instance. A huge amount of processing. The way I look at it is we’ve built our first app. That gives us a huge amount of knowledge because a lot of coins today, they’re building these theoretical solutions. They don’t actually know a specific use case that they’re solving for. We know one.

Here’s what happened at Salesforce. I built web publishing software because I knew exactly what I needed to build and that helped everybody else in the industry. One thing to point out was in the early days of Salesforce, everybody said, hey, it’s cheaper. What I did, there will be an ecosystem that will develop around Salesforce and Salesforce will end up being far more innovative than the software you’re buying for client server.

While it’s not apparent early on that it’s more innovative, there’s just a lower cost. That’s what ends up happening. So, I think that because we have an open source, we’re effectively an open source project unlike Amazon Web Services or Google.

I think you’re going to have a whole industry of people who are trying to innovate and build new applications just exactly as we’ve done. If you think about it, video is controlled by a very small number of companies and there’s been no innovation. You go past YouTube and it’s really hard to find anybody who’s done anything that is a significant innovation to video.

Now, we will change that with VR and maybe some others, but, I think in time, we will we will build other applications on top of our infrastructure. But we’ll also spend a lot of money and time trying to seduce developers to come in and build on top of our infrastructure. I think ultimately you should be able to develop video sites like you’d develop websites.

This is just a personal belief of mine because right now everybody has to live inside of the container of YouTube and their monetization system. I think one of the things that we can allow is for a lot more destination-oriented content sites to begin to flourish. Right now, people will build an app and they’ll sell it to the History Channel and it’ll collect its AWS. Let’s say an app will be bought by the Home Channel or Sci Fi. All of those apps are basically exactly the same and they just connect to AWS. They’re generally boring and don’t do anything breakthrough.

We have people like Hanno Basse, who’s one of our advisors, and he’s doing it because we as a company kind of solve two fundamental problems. How do we lower the cost that these guys are experiencing as video explodes on demand over the Internet, paying to Amazon and how do they figure out new monetization strategies with things like VR? To answer your question, I think there’s going to be a whole bunch of innovations.

What are your thoughts on innovation in the space, and how infrastructure-based projects like VideoCoin can help? For example, I’m thinking of how STEEM is building something called smart media tokens (SMTs), and many developers are using those to launch new functioning and profitable businesses. It’s really helping entrepreneurs break through current limitations.

Anytime that you can reduce the cost of something, you unleash new forms of innovation. Like FOX for instance, they want to put all of their sports content into the cloud because they’d like to then take that and start creating new products like the History of the Redskins or the history of a player, so they can basically create these sort of micro-content packages which they can monetize either by charging or with advertising.

They need to be able to put everything up in the cloud. I think there are a whole bunch of ideas emerging in crypto right now, as you point out, that are sort of next-generation video platforms. The Internet is now the Videonet. And so, I think with crypto, lower cost infrastructure de-centralization, I think you’re going to finally see a sort of reemergence of real solid video innovation.

Editor’s note: This is the end of part one. Part two contains Halsey’s thoughts on innovation and entrepreneurship with new technologies, problems with the current banking system, regulation, the global landscape, and how the cryptocurrency industry contrasts with the nascent Internet industry in the mid to late 90s.

The post Interview: Halsey Minor on Transforming the Video World with VideoCoin [Part 1] appeared first on CoinCentral.

source: https://coincentral.com/halsey-minor-videocoin-part-1/

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stack-of-shame · 7 years

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Shamesplosion II: Regexance

Game #26: Legend of Kay, Neon Studios, 2005

Legend of Kay is part of a peculiar group of games from the waning years of “Character Action Games” (now known as 3D platformers). In some ways these games, including Kay, are some of the best in the genre. The industry had learned how to make controls feel good. Even more esoteric things, like combo moves, had been standardized to a degree. The camera, once nausea inducing, now seamlessly balanced between the gentle hand of the game and the user’s input.

For all that is expert about Legend of Kay, it flies a bit too high. The cutscenes and conversations over-rely on generic, canned animations. I believe that all the voice talent in Legend of Kay were fine actors, but, searching the game’s credits, there was not a dedicated voice over director. As such the voice performances as a whole leave something to be desired.

Why am I picking these nits? Because cutscenes demand a certain quality to justify their presence in a game. Unless they are very good, they drag the experience down. I think I’d have enjoyed Kay more if the conversations had been presented only as text. I don’t say that to be cruel, I honestly believe that the atmosphere would have been easier to establish.

Game #27: Quadrilateral Cowboy, Blendo Games, 2016

Quadrilateral Cowboy vs. Jazzpunk is an amazing case study in game audio

Largely because, given access only to the visual elements of both games, you could easily be forgiven for confusing the two.

Both have an aesthetic that blends minimalist geometry and a honey-mustard color-sheme with 80s cyberpunk, both feature a main character who is sent on various "jobs" which involve traveling to an ambiguously virtual dimension to perform espionage, and both treat pre-digital and recently digital technology as a plaything in their world-building.

If, however, you were given only the audio of each game, you would never confuse the two.

On the blog for Necrophone games, they outline the absolutely bonkers lengths they went to to achieve the sound. Many of the noisemakers used for Jazzpunk's soundscape actually built from scratch, soldering and all, by the game's creators. Bringing that level of depth to a game's sound would be admirable for a sound designer, let alone someone who is also devoted full time to simply making the game.

The soundscape of Jazzpunk is like nothing else I've heard before or since, except perhaps in a Martin Denny record. It's a jangly, agitated mix of synths and old jazz records, a kind of James-Bond-cyber-mambo. The implementation is straightforward for the most part, though outright bizarre at times, with attention-grabbing samples coming it at inappropriate times, but because the rest of the game is so damn weird you forgive it somehow.

For everything that is bizarre about Jazzpunk, it relies on more traditional adventure puzzle mechanics, as well as callbacks (there's a quake clone hidden in a wedding cake). The puzzles are hilariously gratifying to solve, but Jazzpunk does not have many new skills to teach the player.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is, in some ways, more sophisticated than Jazzpunk, and I'm not just talking about their approach to humor. Cowboy's gameplay has something quite new to offer players, and something which feels like somewhat of a holy grail in game design; it makes it feel cool to write code. For a while it seemed like there were so many attempts to make games about coding that reviewers were declaring the effort itself to be futile. But Cowboy has done it.

When you look at the credits in Quadrilateral Cowboy, under audio, it simply says "Soundsnap.com" As such very little in Cowboy's soundscape really feels like it belongs to the game. Many of the sounds are appropriate enough. But they do not have that intangible sense of having somehow come from the game itself.

The implementation of sounds is just as puzzling as in Jazzpunk, but unfortunately it is to negative effect. Point-located sounds are at maximum volume when standing near them, and nearly silent when a few steps away. When the player character throws something, they often emit a cough, not the expected effort sound.

The music is completely diagetic, which can be a powerful decision. It is all licensed, and is used to build the settings and tell you things about the characters. All in all a strong point in the soundscape.

I adore both games, but y'all can guess which has been my enduring favorite.

Game #28: Snuggle Truck, Owlchemy Labs, 2012

This game has been in my library for five years, and I sorely regret not playing it immediately after buying it. Snuggle Truck smacks of the Indie Revolution. These kinds of games, centered around a straightforward-but-wiley physics-based mechanic, will always have a special place in my heart. I found myself wondering if this game would be able to stand out if it were released today. Perhaps it would, given Owlchemy’s outreach.

But how Snuggle Truck would do in today’s market has nothing to do with it’s validity as a work of art, nor does it have anything to do with how deserving it is of commercial success.

I think about the discussion going on in the indie game community, about the “indiepocalypse” and the “indie bubble.” I think it’s easy to forget that there was never a time when making a game was risk free. It was never a case of, “make game, get paid, onto day three of my indie adventure.” It has always been hell. Maybe the marketing wasn’t hell for a short while. Everything else has always been hell.

Game #29: Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Double Fine, 2016

I don’t like admitting that I always kind of thought Broken Age invented the whole switching between characters thing. I’ve been touting myself as a fan of point and click adventure games for a while now, and it’s just embarrassing to think I had gotten the whole picture after having played only a tiny selection from what the golden age of this genre has to offer. Man there are a lot of these things. They are a huge time sink though, often designed to take 40 hours to play. I’m not gonna lie, as much as a I adore these games I have myself a good ol’ fashioned think before I choose to start in on one.

Day of the Tentacle is great, by the way.

Game #30: Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death, Rebellion, 2003

According to steam, I have played this for 13 minutes. I couldn’t tell you a thing about it because I have no memory of doing so.

Game #31: Elite Dangerous, Frontier Developments, 2014

Oh the deep, dark, horrible shame. My boyfriend bought this game for me at considerable expense in the hopes of giving us another thing to do together. As we booted up the game, he explained to me how we would do one simple thing to boost my cash reserves, and that we’d then be able to do some fun stuff together. He would give me some items, I would sell them. Easy. Would you care to guess how long this took? Trade and sell. How long? How long do you think?

Three hours. It wasn’t because of our internet connection, it wasn’t because we were very far apart, it wasn’t because we had to do multiple runs, that is how long it takes to do all of the preparatory work in the 20 odd menus and locales you need to visit, then rendez-vous in space, then use a slightly smaller set of menus to open a thing, arm something else, send out another thing, there’s something called a limpet, (I’m assuming it’s named after a British cookie) and then I got the thing and then I could fly back to the station blah blah blah blah.

I cried. I cried, people. I felt so much like a dumb failure, like a complete waste of my boyfriend’s generosity, that it honestly upsets me to write about it. He did his best to comfort me and assured me he wasn’t mad (yeah, he saw the cry happen) but we have never played it again. I still technically own it but I have hidden it from my steam library because the mere sight of it is disturbing to me, even now.

Game #32: Mass Effect 2, Bioware, 2010

I have started using Mass Effect 2 to bone up on my German. It’s got full German language support. I only get about a 3rd of what they’re saying. It makes me chuckle how the made-up sci-fi words get pronounced with an American accent.

Game #33: TRI: Of Friendship and Madness, Rat King, 2014

Exposition of any kind is a tough sell, especially in the fantasy genre. Unless you have Ian McKellen in your roster, almost any fantasy writing is going to sound silly when read aloud. Put another way, dramatic voice over in a game is one of those things that cannot be anything less than great. I’m tempted to compare this to Journey. Both do a good job of building a fantastical world with magical architecture and a story that existed long before you arrived, but Journey does it better. They probably could have gotten a budget for voice over, but they chose not to use it, and I think it was the right decision. Even with the best voice cast and writers in the world, human voices would have made the world more familiar, to it’s detriment.

And here’s the thing: in all likelihood, the team behind Journey wrote down just as much detail about the backstory of their game as Tri presents aloud, and a million times more. It may seem that choosing to tell your game’s story without voice over would save effort in terms of storytelling, but nothing could be further from the truth. To expose a world to a player without dialogue, you have to know how your world affects the walls, clothes, materials, gestures, decor, artifacts, absolutely everything the player encounters, because that is the sum total of what you have at your disposal to tell your story. I’m told that there’s a real mind bender of a game waiting for you if you stick with it, so I may revisit.

Game #34: Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball, Erik Asmussen, 2015

I am a chronic late adopter of multiplayer games, partially because I’ve never been able to afford them when they’re new. I’ve never joined one in time to get good at it at the same pace as all the early adopters. For my entire life playing games, I’ve found myself getting stomped by people who have hung on long after a game’s heyday, people who know every trick, and who’s patience for newbs ran out years ago. Which is a shame because this game is colorful and awesome.

#too many games #stack of shame #gaben #steam sales #shamesplosion #day of the tentacle #snuggle truck #quadrilateral cowboy #jazzpunk #legend of kay #the world doesn't need another review of mass effect 2

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